4 Day Work Week Sponsors

Last summer, amid surging gas prices, Utah became the first state in the nation to mandate a four-day workweek for state employees.

A recent assessment of the program by state planners found the expected energy cost savings haven't materialized, but there have been unexpected boosts to productivity and worker satisfaction.

Unforeseen Benefits

Sonia Smith is one of the 18,000 state workers who began a four-day, 10-hour workweek eight months ago. At first, she says, she was shocked and scared about the change. The state accountant is a single mom, and she worried about child care for her 10-year-old son. Now, Smith is a champion of the switch.

"I like having the three-day weekend," Smith says. "I like being able to have one day set aside to do everything that I need to do, and then the other two days where I can devote to my son."

Every Friday morning now, Smith volunteers at her son's school. She helps students with their spelling tests and relishes the extra time with her son. Smith's family and baby sitter adjusted their schedules to enable her to work the adjusted hours.

Smith is among the 70 percent of Utah state employees surveyed who now say they prefer the shorter workweek. Mike Hansen, strategic planning manager in the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget, says one of the more surprising effects of this workday change is that employees are now taking significantly less leave.

"That's increased productivity — that's employees behind their desk more this year than the last two years, to the tune of 9 percent" less time off, Hansen says. Paid overtime is also down.

With orders for mining rigs down, Sandvik Mining and Construction faced a dilemma. The manufacturer had to cut its employees' work hours, but didn't want the high-skilled workers to leave for other jobs before business picked up again.

Human resources director Donna Burdge called the local work force development board FloridaWorks, which found the Short Time Compensation Program, a little known but growing program that allows Sandvik employees to work four days a week and receive unemployment pay for the fifth day.

Unemployment pays about half of normal wages up to a maximum of $55 a day. For most of Sandvik's employees who earn $13 to $20 an hour, the maximum is less than half a day's pay. But the $55 plus another $25 a week in unemployment benefits from federal stimulus legislation is $80 a week they wouldn't receive otherwise.

The short-time program was created to help businesses keep employees by reducing hours instead of having temporary layoffs during slow times.

"Many of the employers calling us have a very specific skilled work force for their industry and they're just waiting for that next order," said Kim Tesch-Vaught, senior director of work force for FloridaWorks. "The fear is if you have to lay somebody off or downsize, what happens when you get that call? You want to get your work force back. This is a way to extend that period of time."

At our company-wide get together last December we decided that 2008 was going to be a year of workplace experiments. Among other things, we discussed how we could make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy.

Here’s are a few of the things we’ve implemented so far:

Shorter work weeksLast summer we experimented with 4-day work weeks. People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.

So if that’s the case we could either push everyone to work harder during those five days or we could just skip one of those days. We decided to skip one of those days.

So recently we’ve instituted a four-day work week as standard. We take Fridays off. We’re around for emergencies, and we still do customer service/support on Fridays, but other than that work is not required on Fridays.